A former Post Office boss has apologised for saying that a pregnant subpostmistress being wrongly jailed for 15 months was “brilliant news”.
David Smith, a former managing director at the government-owned firm, emailed colleagues to congratulate them on successfully prosecuting Seema Misra, who was accused of stealing £74,000 from her branch in West Byfleet.
He told the inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal that “with a 2024 lens” the email about her case was “poorly thought through”.
Ms Misra, whose conviction was quashed in 2021 but has not yet received compensation, told Sky News she did not accept his apology and said he was only saying sorry because he was at a public inquiry.
Referring to Mr Smith’s evidence that the Post Office saw her prosecution as a “test of the Horizon system”, she said: “How can they do a test on a human being? I’m a living creature and they did mention a test case and then apologising after 14 years, it’s not … I haven’t accepted it.”
She added: “Like all the people who are appearing in the inquiry, I asked them, please accept [that] everyone lied enough. So please for a change can they come in and tell the truth, nothing but the truth. That’s what we need.
“Yes they are apologising now but they missed so many chances before. We had a GLO [compensation scheme], we had my conviction overturned, nobody came that time to apologise. And now they just realise that when they appear in [a] public inquiry they have to apologise.”
Ms Misra said she still has nightmares about her prosecution: “It was a horrible, horrible time. I’d been waiting for my second pregnancy for nearly eight years and then news came through I was going to trial and we couldn’t even celebrate because we had a trial hanging over our head.
“It was really bad. I’m okay to fight and all that but the sentencing bit, the imprisonment, the four months away from my family, that was the most horrible. It still gives me nightmares.”
Ms Misra began running a Post Office in West Byfleet, Surrey, in 2005, but was suspended in 2008 after being accused of stealing.
She was handed a 15-month prison sentence on her son’s 10th birthday in November 2010 and was eight weeks pregnant when jailed.
Ms Misra’s conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal in 2021.
Following her conviction and sentence, Mr Smith sent an email to managers, including Paula Vennells, asking to “pass on my thanks” to the legal team.
His email read: “Brilliant news. Well done. Please pass on my thanks to the team.”
In his witness statement to the inquiry, Mr Smith said his comment of “brilliant news” was due to the fact he believed “Horizon had been proved to be robust” following Ms Misra’s trial.
The former managing director also blamed the lack of further investigation of complaints made by subpostmasters about the Horizon IT system on “institutional bias”.
Mr Smith said the organisation’s board members were “not as focused as we could and should have been on the Horizon issues” and that potential opportunities were missed to “consider an external investigation”.
It was suggested that the Post Office commissioned a report – known as the Ismay report – to give assurances about the faulty IT system that was intended as a counter-argument to allegations made against Horizon. Mr Smith denied this, but admitted that “there were potential opportunities missed at the time of the Ismay report to dig deeper, or to consider an external investigation.”
An internal Post Office email from the head of information security Sue Lowther in March 2010 showed that the organisation wanted a review of the Horizon system to “confirm our belief in the robustness of the system and thus rebut any challenges”.
Mr Smith – who was the Post Office’s managing director between April and December 2010 – also admitted that the Post Office’s powers to investigate and prosecute cases might have meant the organisation did not “act independently”.
He said there were “inherent risks” involved in the prosecutions taking place in-house as opposed to by an independent authority.
He told the inquiry: “I’m sad to say at the time I didn’t really reflect on it in the way that I perhaps should have done.”
Mr Smith added that, with hindsight, management should have identified those risks, to put in place “better control mechanisms”.
Asked to what extent he accepted responsibility for not identifying that risk, Mr Smith responded: “I certainly think I am a part of it.”
